KLEAR PICTURE

If you are weary of configuration battles with software for digital TV, try Klear, a TV system for Linux that is easy to install and use.

Digital TV on Linux is commonly associated with time-consuming installation procedures. Setting up MythTV is a challenging experience, and the alternative VDR system is anything but trivial – unless you happen to use a specialized distribution such as LinVDR, that is.

Klear [1] is a GUI-based program that makes it much easier to play and record DVB programs. The program was written by Patric Bico Sherif, Omar El-Dakhloul, Manuel Habermann, and Marco Kraus at the Technical University in Berlin as part of a course in programming. Klear uses the Qt toolkit to provide a GUI and assumes a working DVB subsystem, although most current kernels should support DVB hardware without any trouble. The DVB-S/ T/ C devices sections on the LinuxTV wiki [2] tell you which PCI cards and DVB USB sticks are supported by Linux.

A training video of a new application can really reduce the learning curve. The recordMyDesktop program is at an early stage of development but already stable enough for everyday use. We'll show you how to use the program to capture custom procedures in a desktop video.